As one of our instructors likes to put it, "we let the wheel fall off" on Wednesday. Fell off my ass, we drove the car off a cliff and blew it to oblivion on Wednesday all before 10am. The morning started off with two tests, one on alcohol beverage control laws, and one on communication skills for LEO's. Right off the bat we had two people put their scantron sheets in the wrong piles our tests were then supposedly put through the shredder and we would retake both tests in essay form on Friday morning... wonderful... next came PT, where we were going for a 4 mile formation run on a new route. Just before the run our Sgt gave us our guidon too (a flag designed by our class to carry when we are in public to show pride in the department and our class, they're a pretty big deal in the police and military world). So we start out our run and we are about 2.5 miles into it and all hell breaks loose people start falling out left and right, the formation starts breaking down, our instructor stops calling cadence because we weren't sounding off, and then not more than 30 minutes later our Sgt takes our brand new shiny guidon away from us. So much for class pride... from there our Sgt slows the run down and takes us into a park away from the prying eyes of the general public. Once in the park he threw our guidon on the ground and instructed his team to do their worst for the next 15 minutes. We then proceeded to attempt to push the ground all the way to China... after that our Sgt proceeded to tell us he wouldn't be sticking around for the rest of the day and was telling his team to continue the punishment until he came back at the end of the day. Grrrrreeeeeaaaaattttt...
And so began one of the hands down worst days of my life... from there on out for the rest of the day, if we weren't in class we were getting physically destroyed. Most of our time not in class was spent in what's known as the Roman chair position (squat position with your feet at a 45 degree angle, knees touching, back straight, arms held straight out in front of you with elbows locked, and head up) while holding one volume of our training manual which weighs about 8 pounds, and if you've never tried to hold 8 pounds of dead weight straight out in front of you for at least 10 minutes at a time, ill save you the pain and suffering and let you know that it sucks BAD!! It's Sunday and my legs and shoulders still hurt...
From the time our Sgt left until he came back we screwed up everything we could possibly screw up, and the punishment kept getting worse. By the end of the day we were squatting in a baseball catches position and passing 25 pound weights from the gym back and forth from one end of the squad to the other while reciting 10 codes.
At the end of the day our Sgt was back in the building, but he didn't talk to us again nor save us from punishment until Friday at lunch. It's a bad feeling to know that your Sgt is so disappointed in your performance that he can't even talk to you about how disappointed he is. By the end of the week the flames were mostly out from the wreckage, and we'd put one wheel and one lug nut back on but we are still a long way away from being back to where we were before Wednesday. One of the other recruits said that we are one of the worst classes at running to date and we are going to be doing a lot more of it from now on.
In other good news from the week, the tests we took werent actually shredded, that was just to make a point and I was the only person to get 100% on both tests!!! On Friday we got another period of instruction on firearms, and we now get to put our holster and magazine pouches on our duty belt and carry our bright red plastic training guns so we can practice drawing drills whenever we get a chance. Today we had an off duty PT session at the academy led by us where we ran the POPAT (police office physical assessment test) which I couldn't even finish in the time limit when we ran it originally in week one, today I ran it in 5 minutes 5 seconds which is a pretty respectable time considering the time limit is 7 minutes 20 seconds and the fastest person in our class ran it in 4 minutes 25 seconds the first time so I'm pretty stoked on it!!
I'll leave you with my quote of the week...
"if you didn't win, you didn't try hard enough"
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